Abstract
The present experiments investigated the effects of varying message-presentation rate and task complexity on human performance. Variables examined in the experiments included message rate, message presentation format, probability of a target message, and number of response alternatives for target messages. Response accuracy was used as a measure of operator performance. Significant main effects were obtained on all independent variables, except format of message flow. Increasing the message rate, target probability, and number of target categories resulted in poorer accuracy. In general, decreases in accuracy were accentuated when two or more of the manipulated factors were increased. This negative synergism must be taken into account in designing a user-system interface for control systems based on textual-message communications.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.